Circular Economy Podcast By cover art

Circular Economy Podcast

By: Catherine Weetman
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  • Summary

  • Catherine Weetman interviews the inspiring people who are making the circular economy happen. We explore how circular, regenerative and fair solutions are better for people, planet and prosperity. We’ll hear from entrepreneurs & business owners, social enterprises, and leading thinkers. You’ll find the show notes and links at www.circulareconomypodcast.com, where you can subscribe to updates and useful resources.
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Episodes
  • 130 Heather Davies: the Re-Action Collective

    130 Heather Davies: the Re-Action Collective
    May 18 2024
    It’s now 5 years since I started the podcast, and to celebrate, I’m doing a 5th anniversary mini-series. I’ve invited several guests from the Re-Action Collective, a group of circular economy pioneers in the outdoor sports sector. Over the next few episodes, we’ll be hearing from them and exploring 3 different types of circularity – sharing, repairing and repurposing. The Re-Action Collective was formed in 2022, by Gavin Fernie-Jones and his friend, Heather Davies. We met Gavin back in Episode 72, talking about One Tree at a Time, a circular social enterprise to repurpose outdoor gear and ski-wear and to share value with the community and nature. In this episode, we’ll meet Gavin’s co-founder, Heather Davies, a freelance sustainability-focused content creator and communications trainer. Heather is motivated by a love of nature and the outdoors, and she works with a range of organisations, helping them communicate their sustainability stories and strategies, without greenwashing. She also offers training, including carbon literacy courses. The Re-Action Collective is all about Making the outdoors more affordable and accessible, and over the next few episodes, we’ll meet some of the member organisations, with business models based on sharing, repairing and repurposing. Heather and Gavin formed Re-Action to challenge product marketing that tells us we need shiny new, highly technical kit to access the outdoors. They say “We live in the outdoors and we know this isn’t true. We also know a lack of access to basic outdoor kit and absence of community are barriers to people getting outside and active for the benefit of their physical and mental health.” The Re-Action Collective wants to amplify the voice and impact of circular economy pioneers in the outdoor sports sector, for example running, cycling, climbing, surfing, sailing and snow sports. Member organisations rescue products and revive them through repair, rebranding and repurposing. They then redistribute items through resale, rental and donation and reallocate profits to regenerate the outdoors. Re-Action is focused on community-first solutions and wants to empower citizens to be more mindful about how they buy, maintain and dispose of their outdoor clothing and equipment. We’ll hear how the collective works in practice, and how they’ve developed ways to avoid the pitfalls of shared interest groups that end up being hard to engage with, because they generate too much information and conversation.
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    45 mins
  • 129 Alex Holland: SolarPunk Stories for a circular future

    129 Alex Holland: SolarPunk Stories for a circular future
    May 4 2024
    How do we draw people towards a deliciously sustainable future? In this episode, we’re going off at a slight tangent: to explore how we can bring people into this world, to feel they have agency and to see an exciting, meaningful future where we do better, with less. We’re going to hear about a way of telling stories – that could be fiction to help people understand circular solutions, or it might be stories to help them imagine how circular products and services work in real life, helping them see how that’s more fulfilling than buying yet more stuff and adding to the problems of waste and pollution. Alex Holland is the Founder of SolarPunk Stories, and has worked as a journalist in the UK, Venezuela and India. Alex has an MA in Leadership for Sustainable Development and created the world's first Tea Pub which was also Crowdcube's most-shared startup. SolarPunk is a much more optimistic genre than dystopian fiction – it’s more like the Thrutopian concept set out by Professor Rupert Read in an article for the Huffington Post, a few years ago. Utopias are too fantastical, whereas dystopias can be useless, even dangerously doom-mongering. Instead, we can create thrutopias: stories that help us see a way through the challenges we face, that help us build a vision for the future we want to be part of: a regenerative, fair and inclusive future that we can be proud of. Stories that help us to imagine, to feel what it would be like, and to design the political and economic systems to get us through.
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    51 mins
  • 128 Tara Button: products that say ‘Buy Me Once’

    128 Tara Button: products that say ‘Buy Me Once’
    Apr 20 2024
    Tara Button is the founder and CEO of Buy Me Once, a platform which helps people buy the longest-lasting products on the planet. If you’ve heard me talking about the 3 essential strategies for circular businesses, you’ll know that one of those 3 strategies is Keeping things in use for longer, through durability, repairability and resellability. I get frustrated by how difficult it is to find good examples of companies doing this, and so it was brilliant to discover Buy Me Once, which is all about finding products that meet that criteria and helping people find them. Back in 2015, Tara was a frustrated advertising creative, tasked with increasing the chocolate consumption of children, when the gift of an heirloom cooking pot sparked the idea of Buy Me Once. The platform went spectacularly viral in 2016, allowing Tara to leave Ad Land. Since then, Buy Me Once has partnered with 100s of ethical brands to help consumers buy for the long term, for a wide range of products from kitchenware to bedlinen, home furnishings to electronics, and for clothing. Tara explains what led her to start Buy Me Once, and the ethos underpinning the choice of featured brands and products. We hear what is driving the push for more durable, repairable products, and how the feedback from customers can help brands to improve their products. Tara has also become a disruptive voice, speaking about product durability at events, on TV, podcasts and BBC radio. Tara’s early career in marketing and advertising meant she could unpack the psychology of consumerism, and she has written a very engaging and insightful book on mindful consumption, A Life Less Throwaway, published by Harper Collins. We touch on aspects of what’s in the book, which has some great tips to help us spot the various kinds of marketing tactics before we get sucked into the ‘buy it now’ decision.
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    37 mins
Leadership Management Economics
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